Total War in the Twentieth Century

While the illegality and impracticably of Sherman's total war strategy may seem obvious, 80 years after he burned Columbia the US resorted to it once again. Even with the outcome of the Second World War a foregone conclusion, the US fire-bombed Tokyo and Dresden and then used the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the black humor of his classic novel, Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut speaks through his discombobulated protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, as the conscience of a country that has buried its sins. Vonnegut, a fourth-generation German-American, was an American Infantry Scout who witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden as a prisoner-of-war. He applied his considerable literary talent to tell the tale through the wacky Billy Pilgrim.

Ironically, Billy (alias Vonnegut) and other US prisoners were kept in an underground slaughterhouse during the night bombing raid on Dresden, 13 February 1945, so that they survived the holocaust while over 130,000 Germans were incinerated above. When they emerged from their sanctuary the next day, Billy noted the complete devastation, with 'little logs lying around. They were the people who had been caught in the fire storm'.³³

A similar horror took place at Hiroshima later that year; but in this case there was but one explosive device, and it was nuclear. The devastation came out of an otherwise quiet sky on the morning of 6 August 1945. John Hersey has captured the horror and heroics of those on the scene that fateful day in his classic Hiroshima.³⁴ Through the eyes of six survivors, Hersey describes how over 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed by the blast in Hiroshima alone, while countless others were destined to suffer and later die from the lingering, mysterious effects of radiation poisoning.

Like Sherman's devastation, US policy-makers justified the mass slaughter at Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the theory of collective responsibility: that civilians share the blame for war and should not be spared its suffering. The concept was and remains in violation of the law of war as first codified in the Lieber Code and later affirmed in the Geneva Conventions: civilians are non-combatants and cannot be targets in war.

The 1945 devastation was different from that of 80 years earlier in an important way: it involved the impersonal high-tech weaponry of mass destruction directed against civilian targets. Coming from a silent sky, the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki seemed unrelated to the conventional violence of warfare; for many of its victims it had the character of divine retribution. But the carnage caused by airborne weapons of mass destruction against non-military targets made total war strategy in the twentieth century even more immoral than Sherman's hands-on scorched earth strategy.